So your church members are wired. How do you organize all the social networking?

ABPnews —Once social media becomes a part of your ministry and the conversation at your church, it can be overwhelming to manage. Thankfully, there are a few platforms out there designed to help organize your social networking.

1) I use sproutsocial.com for all our work at ABPnews/Herald. It provides a message box to read interactions on all of our social media platforms, easy ways to publish and schedule status updates on Twitter, Facebook and Google+, robust analytics and a way to monitor keywords or branding. On a cautionary note, SproutSocial has increased its fees, so your monthly fees will likely be higher than ours.

2) If you are looking for free, hootsuite.com is your answer. It provides a way for you to manage multiple social media accounts by reading each in a stream, easy ways to publish and schedule status updates, analytics and brand monitoring. I occasionally use HootSuite to monitor the ABPnews/Herald Twitter account.

3) Most people do not realize that every Facebook page comes with its own built-in scheduler. It is best for you to send out Facebook status updates and/or photos when your church members

4) Another choice that uses all the same features as HootSuite and SproutSocial is bufferapp.com, which started as a mobile app, but now has a desktop version. Buffer is free, and its prized feature is that it will schedule your Facebook and Twitter status updates for you based on their analytics of when your followers are online.